


Summer 1846

by feroxargentea



Category: Brontë sisters RPF, To Walk Invisible (2016)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-20 05:55:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17017005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: It was warm enough for them to take a walk that day.





	Summer 1846

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lirazel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/gifts).



> Written for Lirazel for Yuletide 2018. Thank you to cj2017 for beta.

* * *

 

“Emily, wait!”

Anne hurried up the narrow footpath, brushing sleepy bees from her skirts. After a fortnight of warm weather, the moors were in full bloom at last, dappled with cloud-shadow and broken here and there by the startling lushness of fern brakes.

A cock grouse suddenly broke cover in a flurry of wing beats, startling her so much that for a moment she struggled to catch her breath. She paused, shading her eyes as she watched it fly low and blunder into the bilberry scrub some twenty yards distant, its indignant cry of “G’back! G’back!” floating down to her on the breeze.

She glanced up at Emily, who had halted again to cough and ease her chest. The inflammation that had settled on her lungs over the winter had never quite cleared, though she would never admit as much to anyone, nor take anything the apothecary might prescribe.

“We could turn back if you liked,” Anne ventured, when she caught up to her. “We needn’t walk all the way to the fall today.”

Emily tucked her handkerchief back into her sleeve. “Nay, if tha needst owt to mither on, lass, tha’d best look to thine own health.”

Anne giggled. “Papa would scold you if he heard you talking like a villager.”

“Mind tha dun’t tell ’im, then.” Emily took her hand. “Come on, little one. A few more minutes and then we can rest. I can breathe more freely up here, any road, away from all the smoke and the squalor and the, the...”

“The people?”

“Aye, them too.”

The path wound steeply up the clough, hugging the side of the beck and then climbing a dozen feet above it, before levelling out near a small waterfall. Choosing a dry patch of heather, they spread their shawls and sat down, watching Keeper as he barked and splashed amongst the bog-moss. High gritstone edges loomed over them still, but the valley bottom was far below, only its mill chimneys and a few alders visible through the pall of smoke.

A drab brown-and-white bird lingered a minute by the fall before taking flight and perching on a dry-stone wall farther up the clough.

“A dipper,” Emily said. “I’ve seen her here before, collecting food for her hatchlings with a patience that would put most of our cottagers to shame. Did you see her darting right behind the water? I think she has a nest in there. If we sit quietly enough, she might grow bold and return.”

They lay back on the sweet-scented heather, watching banks of clouds chase each other across the sky. From somewhere above them a skylark’s song was pouring, the bird itself all but invisible against the vastness of the heavens, until at last its breath grew short and it fell back to earth like a stone.

Anne shivered and pulled the edges of her shawl over her arms. Even now, at the height of summer, there was a sharp wind bowing the cotton grass and whistling between the scattered boulders, an ever-present lament in the midst of the tranquillity. Far in the distance a band of darker clouds had started to gather, underscored and heavy with rain; a storm was coming, though it might yet pass them by to the south.

A plaintive bleating broke into Anne’s thoughts, and she lifted her head to search for its source. On the other side of the beck a young lamb was perched on the narrow bank, penned in by a stretch of sheer, heather-clad hillside above it. From far up on the moor came the low, persistent call of its mother. Anne watched the gawky, long-legged creature clamber a few feet higher and teeter on the edge of a rocky outcrop, before giving up and skittering back to the bank.

“Do you think it can cross over the beck?” she asked, sitting up.

“I daresay it could if it wanted,” Emily said. “It must have done so in the first place.”

“The waters may have risen since, though. Perhaps we should tell the farmer about it.”

“It’ll be one of John Bowden’s, and he’ll not thank you to interfere.”

“How can you possibly tell whose it is?”

Emily rose, shaking out her skirts. “Because he’s been running ewes on Far Black Moss these last two years.”

“I didn’t know you were on such terms with him.”

“No more I am,” Emily said, “but I hear all the same gossip you do.”

Anne covered her mouth to hide her smile. “Well, perhaps I was not in the kitchen at the right time,” she said. To her knowledge, her sister had never exchanged more than a “good-day” with most of the villagers, and not even that if it could be avoided; yet she followed their concerns as keenly as a circling kestrel watches its prey feeding unawares on the slopes far below, and with much the same swift, dispassionate judgment.

Emily climbed down to the beck’s edge, grasping at the scrubby heath to steady her descent. “Martha said that John Bowden met her Amos in Nab Lane last week and threatened him with a billhook,” she called back. “And Tabby said that John Bowden was a ranting dissenter and it was no wonder Papa carried a pistol whenever he passed Knowle End. There, is that sufficient servants’ gossip for you?”

“Quite sufficient. Oh, be careful, Emily, you’ll slip and catch your death!”

“I’ll do nowt of the sort. I can cross easily enough if I go barefoot. Stay where you are, Anne. I won’t have you getting cold.”

Emily crouched at the side of the beck to take off her boots and stockings. It was swollen from the previous night’s rain, its water stained orange with peat runoff, turning milky as it dashed over the rocks and into the pool below. Anne watched her hitch up her skirts and search for a shallow place to cross.

A little distance below the pool, the beck widened, its waters spreading out across a base of loose, rounded rocks, slippery with weed. Choosing a flattish boulder just below the surface, Emily steadied herself and took one cautious step, then another. Midway across she faltered as a stone slid sideways under her weight, almost tipping her off; Anne cried out in alarm, but Emily had fallen no deeper than mid-calf, and she clambered onto the far bank unhurt.

The lamb, too young and exhausted to tell friend from foe, bolted a few feet from her but then stood trembling as she approached. Grasping it under its haunches, she bundled it into her arms and straightened carefully.

“Whisht now, little one,” she said. “I shan’t hurt you.”

Splashing back into the beck, she waded a few yards downstream to where the cliff ended in a less precipitous slope. She scrambled onto the far bank and set the lamb down on the coarse turf, where it stood a moment, bewildered, and then sprang away in headlong flight, up onto the plateau of Far Black Moss.

“Can you see where it went?” she called to Anne.

Anne peered at the hillside opposite. “No, it’s gone over the brow, but I can still hear its bleating. And, oh, there is the answering call of the ewe!”

Emily nodded. “All will be well, then. Stay where you are and I’ll climb back up.”

Having picked her way back across the stream and collected her boots and stockings, she hauled herself up to the footpath and sat down next to Anne, holding out the torn edge of her petticoat for inspection.

“I must have trodden on it,” she said shortly. “It’s nowt much, just the hem. I can mend it tonight after prayers.”

“Oh, but you’ll have to wash the peat off it first!” Anne said. “You could leave it for Charlotte to do instead, when she gets back from Ellen’s. She wouldn’t mind; she’d be glad to help.”

“Oh aye, Charlotte likes nothing better than to make herself a martyr.”

“Emily!”

“What? You know it’s the truth.”

“I know _you.”_ Anne poked her with her boot-tip. “And I know you don’t mean the half of what you say. I should have liked to tell the curates as much, when they called last Saturday and Mr Nicholls was so taken aback by your fierceness. Sometimes I think you must be closer kin to Tiger than to me, the way he pounces on a ribbon and tears it to shreds, yet can be found curled up ten minutes later, purring by the kitchen range.”

“Ah, but you suppose him nothing but a domestic beast,” Emily said. “You don’t see him when by night he slips from the kitchen window and goes prowling amongst the tombstones, raining destruction on the mice and fighting the butcher’s tomcat for the spoils. That is his true nature, every bit as fierce as his namesake’s, though he is all compliance when there are mutton scraps to be had.”

“When you are there to sneak them to him, at any rate; and Papa wondering all the while why there is no meat left by Tuesday.”

“Poor little cat, he would have nothing but mice if Papa had his way.” Emily lay back, propping her bare feet on Keeper’s back and spreading her toes so that the wind could dry them. “Don’t you wish sometimes that you could break out and join him? I believe I’d be as mild and obedient by day as any curate might want, if only I could howl at the moon by night, even with no one but the barn owls to hear me.”

“Oh, Emily.” Anne took her hand, squeezing her fingers. “God is there to hear us, always. He sees who we are and who we shall be; we must believe that He does.”

“And we ought to be content with that?” Emily asked, with that familiar note of bitterness creeping into her voice.

Anne lay silent a while, thinking of the brown-paper package brought back by the post boy that morning with yet another refusal slip inserted under its wrappings.

“Someday we shall be heard,” she said at length, with all the certainty she could muster. “I am sure that we shall.”

“And if we are not? If our stories are no more wanted than our verses, must we say, God’s will be done?”

“We must, I suppose. We must submit to His judgment in all things.”

“Aye, submit as Charlotte does,” Emily said, pulling off her shawl and rubbing her feet with it. “But I’m not such a martyr as she is, and I don’t believe you are, either.”

She tugged her stockings and boots back on, coughing as she did so with that hollow rattle that always made Anne wince. Clouds were beginning to race in from the southwest, the breeze strengthening all the while, with a gathering dampness in the air.

“Are you sure your feet are quite dry?” Anne asked.

Emily stood up, brushing flecks of heather-bloom from her dress. “Aye, don’t fuss. Come on, I’ve the supper to get, and bread to set rising.”

They glanced around to check they had left nothing behind. To the west the coming storm had already covered the tops of the moors in a mottled mass of grey, the land and sky merging into one. If they hurried, they might just reach Haworth before the first drops hit them.

“Come, Keeper,” Emily called. She took Anne’s arm, guiding her over the rough track that led down the clough towards the valley bottom, with the mastiff following obediently at their heels.

Behind them the beck went on tumbling over the gritstones, the cotton grass bending and soughing in the breeze. The heather where they had been sitting sprang back upright, its hardy blossoms undamaged; and the dipper, reassured by the unbroken whistling of the wind, returned to her perch by the fall. By the time the sisters had turned the bend in the clough and passed from sight, no sign of them remained but for a few footprints, crumbling slowly away into the peat.

 


End file.
